Induced charge electro-osmotic mixing performance of viscoelastic fluids in microchannels with an electrically conductive plate

Abstract

Micromixers have important applications in lab-on-a-chip, biomanufacturing, and chemical engineering. In this study, a micromixer with a conductive barrier plate based on the induced charge electro-osmosis is proposed. The Oldroyd-B constitutive model was chosen to characterize the flow characteristics of viscoelastic fluids, and the Poisson–Boltzmann model was used to characterize the electrokinetic properties. The effects of the installation of the conductive plate, the concentration of the polymer, and the shape of the conductive plate on the mixing were studied based on the finite volume method. The mixing efficiency of the viscoelastic fluids is 78.3% when a non-conductive plate is placed in the micromixer. However, placing a conductive plate increases the mixing efficiency to 89.8%. As the polymer concentration increases, the mixing efficiency increases, which is attributed to the elastic instability. As the curvature of the conductive plate increases from 0° to 360°, the mixing efficiency of the Newtonian fluid increases by 2.82%, while that of the polyacrylamide solutions at concentrations of 100 and 250 ppm increases by 5.31% and 1.97%, respectively.